Sunday, May 07, 2006

Gmail : You can use it to share big files

My company is one of the largest business process outsourcing companies in the world. We develop a lot of online training courses for our customers. These course files are about 50 to 60 MB in size. We frequently send these files to customer teams. We have a large IT department that supports us with FTP sites and extranets. However there is one seemingly simple requirement that they find very hard to meet most of the time - Exchanging large files with customers for whom we don't have a dedicated extranet.

The IT departments of customer organizations face the same problem too. Setting up an FTP site is sometimes a 2 day affair. They also hesitate to set it up if the file transfer is a one time activity.

Recently one such customer solved the problem for us. They asked us to mail the 15 MB file to their gmail account. We mailed it from our gmail account to their gmail account. Gmail handles such files like a charm.

A few days later my Corporate Finance Professor from Columbia University Business School asked the entire class to mail our final exam paper to her gmail address rather than the university email addess. I was amused to note that all these people trust gmail more than their corporate email addresses.

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